Understanding Zona Pellucida Shear Modulus Before & After Fertilization for IVF

Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Ethical approval The clinical part of this study was conducted in a single Fertility and IVF Unit in a tertiary medical center during the years (2020–2023). The procedure was approved by Soroka university medical center review board (IRB reference 316-23-SOR). All procedures performed in the study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institution research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Patients were recruited to the study after providing informed consent and were made aware that embryos would undergo additional assessments beyond the routine procedures. Each assessment lasted less than one minute per embryo and was performed by a senior embryologist following a protocol specifically designed to avoid disruption of the zona pellucida or blastomere integrity. This approach ensured minimal mechanical stress and preserved embryo viability. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Reprints and permissions